Carl Andre

April 1 - April 29, 2006
521 W 21st Street

NEW YORK – The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present a one-person exhibition of sculpture and poetry by Carl Andre.  The exhibition will consist of two early corner sculptures: Twelfth Copper Corner (1975) and Ferox (1982); and two new works giving visual form to the mathematical axiom stating that “the sum of a number is half the sum of the square of the number plus the number itself.”  The new works were created in situ out of Belgian blue limestone, copper and steel.  Also on view will be a selection of poems from the series entitled Yucatan (1972).

Since the 1960s, Andre has created sculpture that tends to depart from the traditional principles of verticality and monumentality.  His works are usually composed of standardized, identical elements that are either juxtaposed in geometric patterns or randomly scattered over the floor.  Rejecting welded, relational or anthropomorphic sculpture, Andre draws attention instead to the material and spatial specificity of the sculptural object.

Carl Andre was born in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1935.  From 1951 to 1953, he attended the Phillips Academy, Andover, with Frank Stella and Hollis Frampton (with whom he shared a lasting interest in poetry).  In 1957, he settled in New York and shortly thereafter began to create wood sculptures influenced by Brancusi.  He progressively moved on to using sets of identical elements, and to materials such as granite, limestone, steel, lead and copper.

Andre’s first one-person show was held in 1965 at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, and the following year his work was included in Kynaston McShine’s and Lucy Lippard’s seminal exhibition “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum.  He was, with Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Sol Lewitt, one of the leading artists of the 1960s, often associated with Minimalism.  In the 1970s, the artist created large installations, such as 144 Blocks and Stones (1973) for the Portland Center for the Visual Arts, Oregon, and outdoor works such as Stone Field Sculpture (1977) in downtown Hartford, Conn.

Andre’s work has been the subject of several retrospectives, most notably at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1970; the Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, Texas, in 1978; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1978; the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, in 1987; the Haus Lange und Haus Esters, Krefeld; the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, in 1996; and the Musée Cantini, Marseilles, in 1997.  He lives in New York.

Artist Pages: Carl Andre